Friday, February 03, 2017

The Global Terrorism Maps

15,976 people around the world died in terrorist attacks last year. If you watch the news in the 'developed' world you might be under the impression that most deaths from terrorism occur in the West. However Esri's 2016 Terrorist Attacks map clearly shows that the Middle East and Northern & Central Africa are the areas worst affected by terrorism

The same global distribution of terrorist attacks seems to be continuing into 2017. The 2017 Terrorist Attacks map has only one month of data so far but still reports 860 fatalities from 147 separate terrorist attacks.

You can view the global distribution of terrorism over a longer timescale on the Global Terrorism Casualties map. This interactive map from David Johnson shows the location of terrorist attacks over 44 years, from 1970 to 2013.

The concentration of attacks in Northern Ireland, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Algeria, El Salvador and in other countries helps to emphasize some of the most political troubled locations around the world in the last half-century. The dots on the map for each terrorist incident are sized by the number of causalities.

The Global Terrorism Casualties map uses data from the Global Terrorism Database, an open-source database of terrorist attacks around the world from 1970 through 2015.

The Global Terrorism Database has a number of static heatmaps showing the concentration and intensity of terrorist attacks around the world over the last 45 years and for individual years. You can of course use the data to create your own interactive maps of terrorist attacks around the world.